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  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141975443
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $22.99

Love's Executioner

  • Irvin D. Yalom



New edition of this bestselling work from a world-renowned psychotherapist

Why was Saul tormented by three unopened letters from Stockholm? What made Thelma spend her whole life raking over a long-past love affair? How did Carlos's macho fantasies help him deal with terminal cancer?

In this engrossing book, Irvin Yalom gives detailed and deeply affecting accounts of his work with these and seven other patients. Deep down, all of them were suffering from the basic human anxieties - isolation, fear of death or freedom, a sense of the meaninglessness of life - that none of us can escape completely. And yet, as the case histories make touchingly clear, it is only by facing such anxieties head on that we can hope to come to terms with them and develop. Throughout, Dr Jalom remains refreshingly frank about his own errors and prejudices; his book provides a rare glimpse into the consulting room of a master therapist.

  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141975443
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $22.99

Praise for Love's Executioner

Dr Yalom demonstrates once again that in the right hands, the stuff of therapy has the interest of the richest and most inventive fiction

Eva Hoffman, New York Times

These remarkably moving and instructive tales of the psychiatric encounter bring the reader into novel territories of the mind - and the landscape is truly unforgettable

Maggie Scarf

Love's Executioner is one of those rare books that suggests both the mystery and the poetry of the psychotherapeutic process. The best therapists are at least partly poets. With this riveting and beautifully written book, Irvin Yalom has joined their ranks

Erica Jong

Inspired ... He writes with the narrative wit of O. Henry and the earthy humor of Isaac Bashevis Singer

San Francisco Chronicle

Dr Yalom offers a valuable insight into the delicate process of therapy

Sunday Telegraph

Irvin Yalom writes like an angel about the devils that besiege us

Rollo May

These stories are wonderful. They make us realize that within every human being lie the pain and the beauty that make life worthwhile

Bernie S. Siegel

Dr Yalom is unusually honest, both with his patients and about himself

Anthony Storr

Yalom is a gifted storyteller, and from the sound of these tales, a no-less-gifted psychotherapist

Los Angeles Times

This is an impressive transformation of clinical experience into literature. Dr Yalom's case histories are more gripping than 98 percent of the fiction published today, and he has gone to amazing lengths of honesty to depict himself as a realistic flesh-and-blood character: funny, flawed, perverse, and, above all, understanding

Phillip Lopate

I loved Love's Executioner. Dr Yalom has learned something that fiction writers learned years ago - that people's mistakes are a lot more interesting than their triumphs

Joanne Greenberg